Conservation Tasks

Question
Identify two children, one in the preoperational stage (2 - 7 years) and one in the concrete
operations stage (7 - 11), and conduct two of the conservation tasks identified on pages 183 &
184 of the text. In addition, ask each child the following: questions and record their answers. "In
a bunch or flowers with two yellow daises and six red roses, are there more roses or
flowers?" "Are you (the child's name) or are you a child?" Conduct your study individually with
each child. Record the age and sex of the child and his/her response to the task or
question. Compare and contrast the responses of the two children. Did your results conform
with those predicted in our class discussion? Give your reaction.
Answer
I chose to do the conservation tasks because I thought it would be interesting to test
Piaget’s thoughts on Preoperational intelligence, which is Piaget’s term for cognitive
development between the ages of about 2 and 6; it includes language and imagination (which
involve symbolic thought), but not yet logical, operational thinking Berger, 2016, Kindle
Location 7318). The two-conservation task that I chose from the book “Invitation to the Life
Span”, was the volume test and the matter test which I will describe below. For this experiment I
need to chose a preoperational stage child and an operational stage child. I chose, a 5-year-old
female and a 9-year-old male, to demonstrate the differences in each stage.
I first sat down with the 5-year-old, I presented her with two glasses of water, which
contained equal amounts of water, I first asked her if the glasses had the same amount of water in
them, she replied, “yes”. As she watched me, I poured one of the glasses of water into a large
narrow glass, this made the lager glass appear to have more water, I then asked her, “which glass
has more” she pointed to the large, narrow glass of water. When I conducted this same task with
the 9-year-old male, he agreed with the female that when the glasses are first presented, they
have equal amounts of water, however when I poured one glass of water into the large narrow
glass and asked the same question, he replied that they still had the same amount of water. The
5-year-old failed to understand conservation because she could only focus on what she could see,
noticing only the immediate condition (Berger, 2016, Kindle Location 7395).
In the second conservation test, I used some play dough and shaped it into equally sized
balls, this time I presented them to the 9-year-old first, he examined them and concluded that
there was an equal amount of clay in each ball, I than reshaped one of the balls into a long thin
shape, I then asked him. ‘which piece had more playdough”, he replied with the same pervious
answer “they are the same”. When repeating this same experiment with the 5-year-old she
responded by saying that the long thin piece contained more play dough. This clearly shows that
the child in the operational stage, he understands the concept of conservation, the notion that the
amount of something remains the same despite changes in its appearance. (Berger, 2016, Kindle
Location 7377)
 After the conservation task, I asked each child two questions. First, I asked, "In a bunch
or flowers with two yellow daises and six red roses, are there more roses or flowers?" The
preoperational child responded that there were more roses, and the operational child responded
that they were all flowers. The 5-year-old demonstrates centration, which is a characteristic of
preoperational thought in which a young child focuses on one idea, excluding all others (Berger,
2016, Kindle Location 7346). In others words she focused only on the numbers, she knows that
six is more then two leading her to choose the roses but didn’t think as logically as the 9-year
old. The second question I asked the 9-year-old was "Are you Alex (name changed for privacy)
or are you a child?" His response was “Alex is a child”, This made me laugh because I expected
his response to be one or the other, and I thought that his response was so smart, because yes, he
is both, his name is Alex and he is a child. I asked the 5-year-old the same question, I thought
she may answer in the same way, however she said “I am Susan” (named changed for privacy).
Again, the preoperational child can only focus on one idea, being that she is Susan not that she is
both Susan and a child.
With this experiment, I can conclude that Piaget was very accurate in the difference
between preoperational and operational stage. I wasn’t surprised by the outcome, because of my
reading from the book, I already had a good idea of what would happen however, I wasn’t sure
about the 5-year-old because in less then a month she will be six, so I was unsure if she had
reached the operational stage, which according to Piaget is between 6 or 7 (Berger, 2016, Kindle
Location 7395).
References
Berger, Kathleen Stassen. Invitation to the Life Span. New York: Worth Publishers, 2016. Kindle
Edition.